GPU Price Index: Dated Street Price vs MSRP from Direct US Retailers (Pilot)

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-09-14 · ~4 min read · St. Louis County, MO

The short version

Graphics card prices spent the whole RTX 50 and RX 9000 generation above MSRP, and most of the numbers that circulate are undated screenshots. This page is a dated, checkable record: the cheapest qualifying street price for eight current cards at named direct US retailers only, each scored against its launch MSRP, with the method, the acceptance rules, every rejection reason and the raw data published beside the numbers.

It is labeled a pilot because the index metric has an activation gate, and the gate status is printed here verbatim rather than worked around.

Latest capture

Latest capture, September 14, 2026 (UTC), method gpu-street-price-discovery-v1: 712 listings reviewed, 32 eligible offers, 7 of 8 tracked cards qualified; the index metric activates at 6, so the gate is open and a series row was written for this date. Every row carries verification_status: discovery_only and publish_ready is False: stock and exact variant are not confirmed at the retailer page.

Cheapest qualifying offer: $649.99 at Newegg.com (AMD Radeon RX 9070 16GB, +18.4% vs MSRP).

This block is rewritten by the capture script on every run; the dated commentary below it is not.

Every qualifying observation

The file below accumulates one row per qualifying offer for each capture date. The table renders from the raw CSV at build time, so it updates the moment the data does and can never disagree with the download.

Rendered at build time from the raw CSV — the table and the download can never disagree.

Method, exactly

Captures run against Google Shopping (US, English) via DataForSEO’s merchant API, one exact-model query per tracked card. An offer qualifies only if the seller matches a named direct-retailer allowlist (Best Buy, Newegg, B&H, Micro Center, Adorama, Walmart first-party, and peers — marketplace suffixes excluded), the title names the exact model and states its VRAM, the listing is a discrete card rather than a laptop, prebuilt, or bundle, condition is new, and the USD price sits between 0.5x and 3.0x the card’s MSRP. Each accepted row records its premium or discount to MSRP to one decimal.

The tracked cards: RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti, 5070 and 5060 Ti 16GB, and RX 9070 XT, 9070 and 9060 XT 16GB. Their MSRPs were verified against NVIDIA and AMD press releases on 2026-09-05; the verbatim passages are in the basket file in the site’s repository, alongside the collector, its tests, and every capture’s raw response.

The index metric (median cheapest premium across cards) activates at six of eight qualifying cards on the same day. Below that, the observations still publish; the index row does not.

Use the data (CC BY 4.0)

Download every observation: gpu-price-observations.csv — one row per qualifying offer with capture date, card, MSRP, street price, premium, seller and verification status. Once the gate opens, the daily series publishes at /data/gpu-price-index.csv. License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — attribute as “TechFuelHQ GPU Price Index” linking to this page.

Choosing between these cards? The GPU comparison tool holds the specs, and the GPU reviews hold the measured results. The sibling DDR5 RAM price index uses the same collector and the same gate.

Change log

• 0.9.0 (2026-09-14) — pilot publication and first live capture. The collector and its tests predate this page (2026-09-05); the page ships the day the daily runner first exercised them against the live API.